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Troubleshoot Email Responses to Approval Requests from Classic Approval Processes
When email responses aren’t working correctly, review these common issues.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
Important Try Flow Approval Processes, a modern alternative to Classic Approval Processes. This
new feature provides a more flexible, user-friendly flow-based interface, and it can trigger
on record changes, supporting Apex extensibility and detailed logging for compliance and
audit trails. It supports dynamic routing based on data and business rules, unlike Classic
Approval Processes, which are tied to specific objects and offer limited support for
processes by using conditions. With Flow Approval Processes, you can monitor submitted
records and quickly identify bottlenecks, giving you unprecedented visibility into approval
workflows. And, like Classic Approval Processes, Flow Approval Processes don’t consume
automation credits or orchestration runs.
I’m not receiving approval requests by email.
Here are a few possible reasons why.
- Your approval preferences opt you out of approval request emails.
- Your mail server thinks the approval request email is spam. Contact your email admin, who can check the logs of all inbound email to see if it’s being delivered, rejected, or marked as spam.
- Your email admin has to add the Salesforce email addresses that the approval requests come from to the allowed email addresses for your mail server.
- Email delivery time can vary based on your ISP or connection.
My response wasn’t delivered.
- An email approval request can only be processed one time. If another user has responded to the approval request before you do, you get an error.
- You must have the “API Enabled” user permission to respond to approval requests by email.
I received an email that said, “The word used to approve or reject the item was not understood.”
Salesforce doesn’t process replies to error emails. Reply again to the original email notification, but this time use one of the supported response words.
I received an email that said, “You are not authorized to update the referenced object.”
The approval request email is tied to your email address. If you forward the request to another email address, or if your email client lets you respond from multiple email addresses, you receive this error. Reply again to the original email notification, but this time reply from the same email address that received the email approval request.
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